Do you find it frustrating when you turn on your brand new computer for the first time and discover a multitude of trial programs and bonus software popping up on the screen demanding your immediate attention? The vast majority of additional software that comes on most mass make computer systems is never even used by the average user. For most people, this ‘bloatware’ is simply consuming hard drive space and often system RAM and CPU resources as well, since many of these programs are configured to load into memory automatically when the operating system starts up. A common procedure I perform for clients who call on me to set up a new computer system for them is to clean out all of the extraneous programs that they’ll never use, thus freeing up memory and resources for the programs my customer actually will be using.

Dell users worldwide have expressed frustration about this on direct2dell.com and ideastorm.com, interactive blogs between Dell and its customers who can give feedback and input about their experiences and relay suggestions to the company. The number of customer objections to ‘bloatware’ reached such a high volume that Dell has responded by giving purchasers an option of choosing “No software pre-installed” for things like productivity software, ISP software and photo and music software when customizing a new system on dell.com.

Trial versions of anti-virus software and the Adobe PDF reader will still be loaded on systems with this option since they are considered critical and important applications that customers at large expect to have on their computers. For more information about this development visit the Dell & Bloatware topic on Direct2Dell.com here.

Computing Term

A web browser is a software program used to process and display web pages located on the World Wide Web (WWW) using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Web page content most commonly includes text, graphics, multimedia files such as video and audio, and interactive software (web email, banking etc.).Web pages often have hyperlinks that web browsers can follow to retrieve web pages referred to elsewhere via URLs (Uniform Resource Locator).